


the cycle.

by DictionaryWrites



Series: Brought To Justice [6]
Category: Marvel, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Child Death, Grief/Mourning, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 07:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14564175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: Just a few short vignettes, examining Loki & his reactions to other people's children.





	the cycle.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for mentions of character death, and then some period pains at the end.

On some planets, Loki is the patron of young mothers. The first time he says this to Steve, offhand, it makes him laugh, but now?

Loki is wearing soft robes of lightest blue, and in his arms, he holds Rhodey’s baby niece. Lila is ten pounds of soft, brown skin and bright eyes, making low burbles of sound, and Loki holds her like he’s holding the most precious thing in the damned universe. He is swaying softly, seemingly unconsciously, and Steve can hear snatches of the soft words he speaks to her, words from the other end of the universe.

Lila’s eyes slowly droop closed, but Loki continues to sway, holding her close against his chest.

“God,” Jeanette – Rhodey’s sister – says softly. “You really have a way with babies, huh? She never sleeps for anybody!”

“I love babies,” Loki whispers softly, and he gently hands her back.

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

“So, like, you _used_ to be a supervillain, but now you’re a superhero?” Loki shifts his position from behind Tony, and Tony wonders, for a second, if it had been a good idea – exactly – to bring the guy in on the school trip.

“Everybody has goodness and badness inside them, young lady,” Loki says quietly, his tones clipped and refined, but warm. “Sometimes, somebody does a bad thing, but that does not mean they will do bad things forever.” The girl is maybe seven, and she looks at Loki, squinting her little eyes.

“I do bad things sometimes,” she says. “I always feel bad after.”

“Me too,” Loki replies. His voice is sad.

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

The beach is busy. Even though Steve, Sam and Clint are out in the water, racing out to the nearest buoy and back (Steve keeps winning), and Stark, Rhodes and Banner are eating ice creams, both sitting on towels and talking about fantasy football, Loki stands apart. Nat watches him where he stands on the promenade, wearing a loose, white shirt and yellow, three-quarter length chinos – it’s the closest she’s seen him get to _casual wear_.

He wears sunglasses, so Nat can’t exactly follow his gaze, but there’s a guy near to him, running in the water with his three kids chasing him, laughing as he pretends to fall into the sea.

The guy even looks like Loki, a little bit: he’s pale as all Hell, with a crop of black hair. Loki’s grip is so tight on the metal bar of the pier that Nat can see it giving way slightly under the touch. _“Our children were wild things,”_ he’d said, “ _roaming in the waves, laughing on the sands…”_

Maybe the beach was a bad idea.

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

“William, isn’t it?”

“Billy,” the kid says, and he puts out his hand to shake. Wanda watches as Loki takes it, shaking her son’s hand politely, and Loki gives him a small, comfortable smile. “You don’t like nicknames, huh?”

“Indeed not,” Loki says quietly. “You look so like your mother.” Billy smiles slightly, meeting Wanda’s gaze, and she feels her heart warm a little in her chest.

“Yeah,” he says proudly. “I really do.”

Later on, when Loki has politely parted ways, Wanda slowly sips at her coffee, and across the table, Billy is frowning into his own drink. She watches him, for a long few moments, and then reaches out, touches his arm.

“Are you alright?” she asks.

“Yeah, just… He just seemed so sad. Loki. Why was that?” Wanda inhales, slowly, and taps her fingers upon the counter between them even as she turns her head to look out of her apartment window. The sun is beginning to set – Lorna and Tommy will be here soon, and maybe Pietro, but she expects he’ll come around later. Or not at all, if he realizes Father is joining them for dinner. She thinks of the conversation she and Loki had had as they’d walked out toward Atlantis.

“He lost his children,” she says finally. “His daughter looked a lot like him, he said.”

“Oh,” Billy says softly. He runs a hand through his hair, shaking his head. He’s so young – barely a teenager, _really_ – but he acts like he has the world on his shoulders. He sort of does. “That’s tragic.”

“Yes,” Wanda agrees. A beat passes. “Let’s wash up for dinner.”

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

“You don’t have to be an Avenger, you know,” Clint says, over dinner. Loki freezes, his gaze down on his plate, and the table goes sort of silent. Clint swallows, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck, “Well, not saying we’d kick you off the planet or anything. Just… You know. You could do other stuff. I bet Xavier’d let you teach at the X-Mansion.”

Loki inhales. Exhales. But Clint knows damn well he’s onto something – Loki had hated being in the field today, hated arguing with SHIELD operatives, hated the paperwork he insists on filling out himself, hated all the bureaucracy that comes with being a superhero these days.

“Will you pass the salt, Doctor Banner?” he says finally, raising his head. Clint looks at his face, and he sees that Loki’s pale face is utterly impassive, as if he’s forcing away any possible emotion.

“What? You don’t think he’d let you?”

“He offered the first time I met him,” Loki replies, taking the salt. He doesn’t use it, just holds it in his hand. “When he realised I posed no danger.”

“Then why not go there? You hate being an Avenger. You’d hate teaching too?”

“Clint,” Steve says, quietly.

“I’m just _saying_ , you could be… Loki, man, you know. You can afford to be a little selfish. You’d still be doing good stuff, just, you know. Not here. I’m not trying to bitch you out or anything – I just don’t see the point in you being _unhappy_. And you love children.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Mr Barton,” Loki says in such a quiet voice that even with his hearing aids Clint can’t pick it up, and he has to read the words on Loki’s thin lips. “I don’t think I could stand to be in an orphanage of lost children every night.” Clint frowns.

“What, you got an issue with orphans? Because—”

“ _No_ , Mr Barton,” Loki interrupts him, his tone emphatic. “I— I cannot be around children.”

“You love kids.”

“Yes,” Loki agrees, painfully. “Yes, I do.” Clint drops the subject.

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

“Do you have children, Commander Fury?” The god asks the question almost idly, his legs dangling down from the side of the building. Given that the skyscraper is pretty damn tall, maybe it should make him nervous to see the guy so close to the edge, but even if he falls, he’d probably be fine.

Nick adjusts the sniper in his hands, putting his eye back against the sight: Loki is gathering some ball of energy in his palm, ready to let loose when Nick tells him where. “Yeah,” he says, finally. “Two boys.”

“I’m sure they’re very noble. Like their father.” It should be an insult, but it isn’t. Loki has a faraway look in his eyes, like he’s a thousand miles away, and it makes Nick a little sick to look at him. Guy is… Weird.

“Target acquired,” he says, and Loki snaps back into action.

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

It is rare that Thor catches his brother crying.

When they were children, Loki had cried so often that Fandral had once labelled him a walking fountain, but as they had grown into boys, and into men, Loki had become better at hiding his emotions, better at pushing them deep within himself. Now, Loki is sniffling, rubbing at his eyes hurriedly with the sleeve of his armour, as if forgetting he has seiðr with which to soothe his wet face, and immediately Thor is upon him, wrapping his arms tightly about his brother’s body and setting his heavy chin against Loki’s shoulder.

Loki’s freezing brow cools Thor’s chest even through the fabric of his own shirt and coat, and Thor hushes him, quietly, patting Loki’s newly thick and fluffy hair as Loki lets out a short, ugly sob.

“You could always have more children, Loki,” Thor whispers.

“I couldn’t stand to lose them,” Loki replies, his voice ragged – he has been crying for some time. The knowledge sets in Thor’s belly like a flood of ice, and he clutches his brother all the harder, feeling his very heart _ache_. “I couldn’t, Thor. I couldn’t, I couldn’t—” And here are more cries, desperate and low, and Thor presses his lips to his brother’s brow, feels him shake in his arms.

Of course he couldn’t. How could anybody?

\----- ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -Ⓐ - ✪ - ✪ - ✪ -----

Loki lies on his side on the sofa in the central living room, his hands crossed over his belly, his knees drawn partway toward his chest. The guy looks fucking awful. His skin, usually pale but imbued with an icy glow, is tinged a greenish purple, and his lips are chapped. His eyes are tightly closed, his expression a mask of pain, and Steve twists his lip to look at him.  

“You okay?” he asks, leaning over to look at him properly, and his hand touches Loki’s forehead, feeling for his temperature, but obviously… Well. He’s cold. No more colder than usual, though.

“Quite alright,” Loki murmurs, lowly. “Pains.”

“Pains?” Steve asks, glancing to his belly. “What from?”

“Humans have these too,” Loki says. A moment of incomprehension passes between them. “Human women.”

“Oh,” Steve says. There’s a sickly sensation in his belly, and he stares down at Loki’s pallid features, at the way his fingers _grip_ at the icepack clasped against his stomach. “I didn’t realize you— That you could still…”

“Bear children?”

“Yeah.”

“Mmm,” Loki replies, grimly. Steve moves across the room, setting a glass beneath the ice machine in the front of the fridge, and he fills it nearly full before putting in a little water as well, then he comes back to Loki, pressing the glass into his hand. “Thank you,” he mutters, and he takes a small sip, his throat working to swallow. “It never stops, you know.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Grief. Even after all my years, it never stops. You believe that it has. You believe the wound has finally healed, and that you have merely a scar, and that all will be well. You believe that finally, finally, life will move on. But it comes in cycles, orbiting to the back of one’s mind, and then coming back to the forefront with the force of a comet at one familiar smell, one sensation, one half-remembered diary entry.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve murmurs. He doesn’t know what else to say.

“Me too,” Loki replies. Steve reaches down, drawing a lock of stray hair out of Loki’s face, and Loki glances up toward him. The misery of expression fades for just a second, and then he offers a very small, reserved smile. It makes something crack inside Steve, but he returns it, until Loki’s eyes droop slowly closed again.

He falls asleep, Steve thinks. It’s probably for the best.

**Author's Note:**

> This kinda came to my head and wouldn't quite go away, so I figured I'd write it out. Not sure how happy I am with it, but I'm glad to have written it down. Let me know what you think!


End file.
